Posts Tagged cancer

It has been two decades since the discovery that many stomach ulcers result from an infection with the bacteria dubbed Helicobacter pylori, or H. pylori for short. Now it is known that about six percent of people in the world carry this infection which is associated not only with ulcers but with stomach cancer. The primary treatment for H. pylori has been antibiotics — but they can cause a host of side effects and, what’s more, the bacteria are quickly becoming resistant to the drugs. But there’s good news: a natural amino acid, glutamine, appears to protect from injury caused by H. pylori and could reduce the risk of gastric cancers associated with the infection, too.

Many studies have shown that eating red meat in high quantities can be harmful to your health. The general consensus seems to be that we should eat less of it. Colon cancer is the third most common cause of cancer in both men and women in the U.S. It affects over 145,000 people and kills over 56,000 each year. The link between colon cancer and red meat has been shown before, but this study by American Cancer Society researchers helps explain the relationship between the two.

The StudyThe findings of this study will be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 293, No. 2: 172-182). It is based on a long-term study of about 149,000 people between 50 and 74 years old. The participants filled out a questionnaire detailing their eating habits in 1982, and again in 1992/1993. The leader of the study was Michael Thun, MD, MS, chief of epidemiology and surveillance research at ACS. Thun and his colleagues looked at how many people had developed the disease by 2001; they then analyzed the risk according to the amount of meat that was consumed.